


and now you've made a poet out of me

by cipherwriter



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Poetry, Emotional Constipation, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, they're stupid and i love them, well fairly happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cipherwriter/pseuds/cipherwriter
Summary: Martin knows that Jon doesn't like poetry. Martin knows that Jon doesn't like him. Still, he can't help but want to hear his poems in that beautiful voice.Jon is learning to love the things he hadn't always loved.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 14
Kudos: 94





	and now you've made a poet out of me

“Have you guys ever actually listened to Jon’s statement recordings?” 

Martin resolutely keeps his head from shooting up. He is in the middle of researching a house that, according to the statement he’s working on, is haunted. (The “triple axe homicide” that the statement giver claims had occurred in the house is not yielding many results.) He has no reason to stop that just to answer Tim’s question.

“No, why would I? He reads them after we’ve researched them,” Sasha answers, and Martin doesn’t really have to say anything himself, now. It’s great just letting other people answer for you.

“Oh, then you are missing out on some great listening,” Tim says, and Martin at last looks up. Tim is holding a tape and a recorder to play it on. “You’re gonna love this.”

He hits play, and that whir and soft white noise of the old tapes starts up, and then the familiar bored drone of Jon’s voice says, “Statement of Sebastian Adekoya, regarding a new acquisition at Chiswick Library. Original statement…”

“Wow, Tim, you’re right, I wish I’d done this a while ago, this is great,” Sasha says, raising an unamused eyebrow at him.

“Shut up, just listen,” Tim says.

Sasha rolls her eyes, but she shuts up.

“...Statement begins.” And then, Jon’s voice shifts. It turns… fond. Wistful. Like he’s reading a love letter, so very unlike the stern man that they all know him as. “Books are amazing, aren’t they? I mean, you think…”

“Oh my god,” Sasha says over it. Her eyes dart back and forth from the tape recorder to Tim, this delighted, dumbfounded grin on her face, as if she’s waiting for him to reveal how this was all some trick.

“I know!” Tim cries.

“He’s doing a whole performance!”

“I know!”

“This man was in college theater, I just know it.”

“He’s practicing for his voice acting career.”

Jon, on the tape, waxes poetic about words and books. Martin finds himself turning rather pink.

Martin has, in fact, listened to Jon’s statements before. Quite often. Sometimes, even, he’ll listen for a moment outside Jon’s door. Just to be polite, of course. He doesn’t want to barge in while Jon is recording. And if he happens to enjoy Jon’s reading, well, that is his business. Jon’s voice is very attractive, no one could really deny that, and, anyway, surely Jon does it all, the inflection and delivery of it, for a reason, so he might like a little appreciation. Even if it is secretly.

It’s just… nice. Good, to hear emotions in Jon’s voice. He was usually so, well, uptight. Dry and professional so much of the time. And around Martin he could tend to be a bit more than dry and uptight. He could be downright mean.

And look, Martin knows that Jon doesn’t like him. He’s not stupid, as much as Jon seems to think he is, just because he stutters and can be a bit clumsy and rambles on quite a bit and, yes, is massively unqualified for the job (not that Jon has suspected his lie yet, so ha). He’s well aware that he is not Jon’s cup of tea. Nor are his cups of tea. Ha, again.

But that’s okay. Martin has dealt with many an unrequited, unexpressed affection in his life and he can do it again. All he has to do is make sure that he never expects anything more from Jon than terse acceptance, maybe even someday distant workplace acquaintances. Besides, romance with his boss, while, yes, incredibly hot, could put his job in danger, and he has too much at stake to lose this.

So, Martin listens to tapes of his boss and daydreams impossible scenarios and does not let on that he is madly into him. But listening to him talk about words, books, writing… it’s just lovely. Martin knows it’s not actually his feelings, but it sounds so real, and god he can’t help but imagine Jon reading his words with the same reverence, Jon’s beautiful voice lacing his poetry with emotion, and how would he read it anyway? How would Jon portray him, what is Martin from his eyes and his voice? 

Martin knows already, he knows he knows he knows what he is to Jon but god, it would be wonderful.

“You’ve been very silent, Martin,” Tim says, and that drags Martin right out of his thoughts. Tim is smiling at him, and Sasha is not looking in a way that is clearly trying to be casual.

“I think it’s very… admirable, the way Jon reads statements,” Martin manages to say without stammering too much. “They’re interesting.”

“So you have listened to his recordings before?” Tim says, and it’s not really a question, as Tim’s eyes are already lighting up with realization. 

“Oh don’t you get like that, obviously you’ve listened to them, too,” Sasha pipes in.

“Yeah, but I have no shame in saying that I think the boss man’s pretty hot,” Tim says, cool as a cucumber. “Marty here still has that whole ‘secret middle school crush’ thing going on.”

Martin splutters out… something, some sort of protest that even he’s not sure of as heat rises in his face, while Tim starts laughing and Sasha tells him off for laughing (but also laughing a bit), and it’s a nightmare, it’s all a nightmare-

“Are you all quite finished with this din you’re making or shall I put off my next recording for another ten minutes?” Jon interrupts, poking his head into the archival assistants’ office. His hair has started to slip out of its tie, and there are wispy black and grey flyaways around his head. His glasses are perched on the tip of his long, angular nose, so he’s looking at them disapprovingly over the top of them. Somehow he manages to look both disheveled and professional. 

Fuck, as if Martin weren’t red enough already.

“Sorry boss, we were just discussing your future as a librarian in a children’s cartoon,” Tim says, and Martin stares resolutely at his computer screen.

“My- what?” Jon asks.

“Just based on your tapes, we figured it was some sort of audition. A PSA about how reading is fun,” Tim goes on, going back and replaying the tape from the start of the statement again. This time, Martin does his best not to listen.

“I try to preserve the authenticity of the statements, Tim,” Jon says, and now he has stepped fully into the room, his small figure coiled in irritation. “First hand accounts should sound first hand.”

“You know what, I agree with Martin,” Sasha says, and oh dear why on earth would she mention him, “I think it’s kind of cool, too, even if it is dorky.”

“I’m flattered,” Jon deadpans to Sasha. Then, his eyes shift over to Martin as he pushes up his glasses and oh lord Jon is looking at him directly, that never happens. He’s always distracted when talking to Martin, at least half his attention on something actually important whenever they speak, but now he’s talking directly to him. “You think it’s… ‘cool?’”

“Yeah,” Martin squeaks, clears his throat, and then starts again. “Yeah, I think it’s very, um… quite” beautiful, unique, distinctive, kind and empathetic just to understand all those emotions, talented to do it all, “...cool.” Wonderful thinking Martin, great description.

“Well. That is.” Jon has looked away from Martin again, but he doesn’t seem bored like he usually does, he seems… almost uncomfortable. “Thank you, I suppose.”

Great going, now Jon probably knows about your feelings, Martin. So now not only are you annoying and stupid, you’re also the weird subordinate that has a crush on him. 

“Anyway,” Jon says, smoothing his hair back again, “please just keep it down.” Then he turns on his heel and walks out.

Martin’s head falls to his hands.

“Well, this has been fun,” Tim says, and then Martin hears him grunt in pain. “Oh buzz off, Sasha, you were joking too. Besides, we both know-” He makes another sound of pain. “Fine, fine.”

Sasha comes over and puts her hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Sorry about that Martin, I hadn’t meant to make you feel awkward.”

Martin sighs. “No, no, it’s… fine. I mean, that was no worse than how he usually is with me, right?” 

And that was true. Martin would have expected Jon to be disgusted when he found out that Martin liked him, so either he hadn’t figured it out or he was hiding his repulsion, which meant he cared at least a little bit about how Martin feels. That should not make him feel as warm and pink as it does.

The worst part of all of this, Martin thinks as everyone settles back into work, is that he’s still thinking about that statement. About Jon. Reading his poetry. Giving him his undivided attention again, his intense brown eyes, only tempered by those glasses and Martin could take those off and-

And thus, Martin’s habit of reading poetry on tapes begins. 

It’s stupid. It’s not as though it sounds like Jon just because it’s on a tape, there’s way more to this fantasy than that, but Martin knows it’s the closest he’s ever going to get. And he feels closer to Jon, in a way, knowing how it feels to sit and read for the whir of the recorder.

Plus, it does actually have a cool lo-fi vibe that he likes.

Martin knows that his poetry isn’t the best on earth. It tries too hard. It’s hesitant, insecure. Big surprise. But it’s always been one of the few hobbies he’s allowed himself, one of the only outlets he’s ever had for his emotions. It’s not like he’s looking to get published or anything, it’s just nice to have one place where he’s actually honest. Nice, sometimes, to hear his work out loud.

He feels kind of bad, sometimes, stealing tapes from the Institute, but he has never once seen any get shipped in, and he has the oddest feeling that no one is going to miss any tapes that he takes, no matter how many.

It definitely does help him improve. He’d heard that advice before and never really tried it out, that you should read your work out loud, but actually doing it makes him see all these different ways he could improve on what he does, make the sounds better and use more interesting language, even just making sure it makes sense. He almost starts to consider posting some online. 

Almost.

So he gets into the habit of reading his poetry out loud, even when he’s not recording.

When he’s trapped in his flat by Prentiss, he writes some poetry. It is disjointed, fragments of a brain that is running on panic and canned food and no sleep, written about the things that he knows, worms and fear and hiding, and things that he has lost, work and friends (they’re connected) and a beautiful face. He reads this out loud anyway, trying to reinforce the idea that he can still speak and hear and that these things really do exist and his life is not just canned peaches and old paperbacks.

He dates all of his poems from this time, trying to keep track of how long he’s been stuck in his awful flat in a haze of fear. It helps him organize his thoughts about it all, because if he is going to be in this situation, he’s going to have two main priorities: survive (physically and mentally) and learn. He is a researcher at the Magnus Institute, and he will try to take advantage of his circumstances. 

He thinks, privately, quietly, that Jon would maybe approve of it, if he knew. 

He slowly, slowly gets back into the habit of writing the kind of poetry he used to write once he’s living in the Archives. His notebook starts out filled with that same panicked scrawl of being trapped, harsh and hasty poems written in the half waking moments after nightmares. But then, he finds ways to defend himself, to turn the Archives into someplace secure. His poetry turns soft again: trees and flowers and pages and lovely faces. A kind man. 

And Jon is kind. Behind all the bluster and bite of professionalism, he cares. And Martin had known, or at least suspected, as much, but he hadn’t thought it would apply to him. That Jon would welcome him into the Archives in his cot where he’d sometimes stay the night (which, actually, was problematic, why was he staying so late) when he was, well, you know, Martin. Stupid silly Martin.

Yet, here he is, and he can’t help but think of the way that he and Jon are so close in these later, more vulnerable hours, as Martin gets into his pajamas and Jon reads on, always in his beautiful expressive voice, and Martin longs for nothing more than to steal that voice from his mouth in a kiss and bring him to bed (literally because when did that man ever sleep?). He wants to speak in Jonathan Sims and be spoken by him, known and defined and categorized by this man who is always ready to sort.

But Martin (K) Blackwood is not a mystery worth solving, is seemingly not a mystery at all. He needs it to be this way, because the lies he keeps could cost him his job and thus his mother and thus the person he has spent his whole life caring for, the one thing he has spent his whole life doing, and if that happens then Martin K Blackwood will not be much of anything anymore.

So Martin simply writes about all these feelings too. He copes.

And he keeps listening to Jon read statements. He still thinks his voice, his reading, is beautiful, but it’s becoming funny, quite honestly. Not the statements themselves, those are still creepy, but the way Jon drops the voice and then says how it all must be “the drugs” or whatever his current excuse is, as if that dismisses everything.

“Finally, you’ve accepted that Jon is great to make fun of,” Tim says triumphantly when Martin first ribs the newest recording. The assistants have taken to listening to all of them together, ostensibly to make sure Jon has read everything right, but often they spend a good portion lightly making jokes about it. You need to blow off steam somehow in a place like this.

“Yeah, well, there’s only so many times you can hear Jon claim that everything can be written off as drunken hallucinations before you stop taking him seriously,” Martin says, and it’s nice to let himself participate in this. Because yeah, of course he still has a crush on Jon, but… listening to some statements, Jon had not always been the nicest, when talking about him. And on tape, no less. Really, If he wants to go on and on about professionalism and integrity, he should try to implement it. 

So, Martin is at a weird place with Jon. He’d let him stay in the Archives immediately, no hesitation, but he’d also been kind of an ass to him before. 

Oddly, when Martin thinks about it, really thinks about it, he realizes that this all makes him feel less uncomfortable around Jon. Knowing that he’d had a professional distaste rather than a personal one, even if it was a strong distaste at that. And fine, Jon thinks he’s not the best at his job. Big deal. Jon isn’t the best either, letting skepticism get in the way of whole statements. So long as he didn’t (or couldn’t) fire him, Martin didn’t really care. Besides, it’s not like he’s entirely wrong. Martin isn’t the best.

It’s a sort of break in the tension. Like, he’d liked Jon as his harsh and serious boss (even if he was kind of mean) (maybe even sometimes because he was kind of mean), but it had been a very nervous infatuation. Now, he’s settled somewhere more easy, where Jon is just as fallible as he is, just as prone to his own shortcomings as anyone else. So they can manage a conversation in which Jon does not dismiss Martin and Martin does not become a stammering mess.

Tim and Sasha are a bit more inclusive of him, now, and that makes Martin more comfortable, too. They hadn’t ignored him before, by any means, but he feels like they make real active effort involve him in things more often now, whether it’s drinks after work or shared lunch breaks or office pranks, even. Martin doesn’t want their guilt or their pity, obviously, but he can’t deny that he likes feeling important for once.

So life goes on, and Martin feels better about his place in the Archives than he ever has, when he can beat back the insecurity that no one had found him while he was gone. They’d thought they’d known why. It’s fine. Stomach viruses didn’t usually last that long, but whatever, it’s not like they hadn’t cared. Hopefully.

And then, there is screaming from Jon’s office and there are worms, writhing squirming awful things, terrible sounds and ugly so disgusting and he’s trapped again only it’s worse because his only friends in the whole world are in danger now. At the very least, he’s prepared to, able to get the worms from Jon and Sasha’s skin; he had known this would happen, and he was not going to go down without a fight again.

There’s too much happening, in the aftermath, too much that has happened for Martin to dwell on the fact that his old notebook is missing. Lots of things were destroyed in Prentiss’s attack. 

His next notebook is filled with frightened chicken scratch ramblings again, most of the time, and he has no methods to make him feel safe this time. Maybe that’s a good thing. No getting lulled into a false sense of security. Sure, his preparations had helped, but he’d still lost Jon, had almost truly lost him, and Tim, and Sasha. He shouldn’t feel safe because he isn’t. 

His poems become very “stream of consciousness.” He stops bothering to read them out loud.

Jon grabs onto… something, as he is being burrowed into, by worms and by a corkscrew. Something solid, but with just enough give to dig his fingernails into. Better this than his hand.

As he sits, panting, hiding, he clutches it to his chest instinctively. It becomes his point of contact throughout the whole affair, something he can hold to him for security through pain and fear and a million tiny things finding a home in him all at once.

Somehow, he manages to hold onto it the whole time, and he still has it once he wakes up. The doctors and EMTs assumed it’s something important to him, for him to have held on to it through everything that happened.

It’s a book, as it turns out. Brown, leather-bound, and, as Jon learns by the thin handwriting on the inside cover, Martin’s. A notebook, then, with its pages edged in blood. Jon assumes that the blood is a new development.

He doesn’t get to look at it too closely for a while, what with being checked over by the doctors and all. As much as he can, though, he holds it to him. Just to have something to hold. It’s comforting, he has to admit.

He takes Martin’s statement, and he plans to give the poetry book back. He does, really. But then Martin is apologizing for leaving him behind and Jon’s heart just. Shatters.

See, Jon is very bad with emotions, as anyone who knows him would attest. Not just at communicating them, but at recognizing them altogether (which, to be fair, probably contributed to his lack of communication skills). He can make broad statements-tired, happy, sad, angry-but he needs time to really pinpoint exact feelings, or their causes.

When it comes to romance, this is a problem. Well, it’s always a problem, but it certainly makes romance especially very difficult. He doesn’t experience certain types of attraction, so he doesn’t have that to rely on, as apparently other people often do. Not just sex, though he certainly is not interested in that; he’s unlikely to find himself wanting to kiss anyone, or stare at them, or anything like that. He likes kissing when he’s in relationships, and he can appreciate the aesthetic appearance of others, but he has no drive to act on any of it. So he has to rely on strange, nebulous thoughts like “he is quite kind” and “he has very soft hands” and “I like his laugh,” all of which are equally applicable to friends, at times. 

Still, he had thought these things about Martin for a while. For all that the man can be a thorn in his side, he has also been one of the highlights of working at the Institute. Personally, he’s a wonderful man: funny, quite capable of matching the humor of Tim and Sasha but with a much different style, not liable to make fun of Jon when a spider scared him, great at making tea (without which Jon would probably forget to drink anything half the time), well dressed and well groomed. He always smelled nice, and from the times where his hands brush Jon’s while they hand things off to each other, Jon knows he’s warm, while Jon is always freezing.

None of that eliminates the fact that Martin is a terrible researcher. He seems to not know how to use a library or a database whatsoever, and instead does ridiculous things like seek out every single middle aged Angela in Bexley. The only thing that can be said about him on that front is his willingness to do anything for research, and it feels wrong to praise him for that now, given everything that has happened.

But Jon’s feelings towards Martin, though he may not let on, are and have been generally positive. And now, as Martin expresses concern for him, when really he should have been making sure he was okay himself, Jon realizes what it is. As he thinks, No, Martin, I’m fine everything is fine you did everything right. As he thinks, Without you we would have died, and this is my fault for forcing you to go after Prentiss in the first place. As he thinks, You have been through this too, you could have died too, you shouldn’t be worrying about me, not then and not now. As he feels like he wants to take care of Martin, show him how he deserves to be worried for himself too.

Jon has realized he has a crush on Martin. A huge one.

So, though it may not be good, Jon keeps the poetry book. He doubts Martin would actually want it back now, anyway, what with the blood and the worm guts crushed between the pages. Like flower pressing, Jon thinks. It’s preserving a moment in time. And that moment in time belongs to Jon now, when he’d been the one to change this from a notebook to a documentation. It’s his.

He doesn’t read it, at the start. It would be invasive. There’s a lot of meaning he’s assigned to it, from his companion in dire circumstances (can you trauma bond with an object?) to a way to feel closer to Martin, and none of it justifies reading the intimate information within.

The notebook simply becomes a facet of his life. It lives in the drawer with his pens (he is not going to leave a bloody paged book on his desk, he already has enough problems at work lately), and he brushes his fingers over it often. He hardly considers what it really is anymore, even as he grows scared of the people around him. It seems it is still his security item, even now.

It is so divorced from its original meaning in Jon’s head, in fact, that by the time he finds out that Martin has been lying to him he doesn’t even think to give it another look through, simply confronting Martin himself. 

And he goes through the trash. He likes to have his case prepared.

But Martin had only been lying on his CV. Honestly, it’s the best news he’s heard in a long time. He really had not wanted Martin, lovely, brave Martin to have been Gertrude’s murderer. It means that Martin’s concern for him is real, not just something to get Jon’s guard down, and he is so relieved he could cry here and now as Martin sits across from him at his desk.

And it’s funny, right? He finally understands why Martin had been such a terrible researcher. Frankly, with this new context, Martin had actually done fairly well. Not that you’d hear Jon say it, because how on earth do you approach that subject? “Gee, Martin, you sure seem a lot less useless than I had thought now that I know you haven’t been to school since you were 17.”

Not ideal.

And then Jon doesn’t have much chance to further connect with Martin at all. He still has to solve Gertrude’s murder before he can start becoming friendly with his coworkers. He still has to keep all the tapes he’d gotten from Basira a secret, because even if Martin didn’t do it, he also does not approve of Jon’s investigation. At least not its methods. So he’s still alone in all this, still can’t try to build something with Martin or mend something with Tim.

It’s all quite stressful, the constant vigilance. And then things go to hell. Here Jon was thinking they’d already been in hell. But that’s nothing compared to finding out that in all his paranoia, all his researching and digging and pushing people away, he’d missed the actual impostor in his midst. Learning that he’s been dragged into what he would have called some weird religion or cult, this “Smirke’s Fourteen,” had he not seen everything he has. 

In all the chaos and strife (yet again), as Jon has to leave to avoid being arrested for a murder that he didn’t commit, he cannot bring the book with him. 

Then, Jon finds himself at Georgie’s house. He can settle here. Georgie is safe, and generous, and far too good to him. He tries not to take advantage, but it seems he can’t help it. He needs to solve this mystery now, figure out what the hell is actually going on in his life with all the supernatural turmoil he’s gotten himself wrapped up in.

He wishes a lot of things, as he just starts to process all that’s happened. He wishes he’d noticed that Sasha had not been herself, he wishes he’d noticed that Elias was the one who’d murdered Gertrude, he wishes he’d noticed that Tim had never meant to hurt him. And, less important, but still seeming to take up just as many of his thoughts, he wishes that, just once, he’d read even one of those poems. 

He misses Martin terribly. He gets the horrible feeling sometimes that they will be as two ships in the night, and that they will never truly be able to join together, and isn’t that a tragic thought?

God, even just thinking about Martin’s poetry has made him become a sentimental little romantic.

And Jon does not like poetry much, in general. It’s never been of much interest to him. He can’t help but think sometimes, though, that it might be better to express his emotions in that than on statement tapes. He’d had a bad habit of using his supplemental tapes as journals, though to be fair to himself, he had been experiencing trauma fueled paranoia. He was allowed some emotional outbursts. But, perhaps taking after Martin and writing poetry might be a better idea, now.

He expects his poetry to be truly terrible when he starts. It’s not like he’s had a lot of experience learning how to write it. But as he gets into it, he finds it’s actually not horrendous, from his untrained eye. It’s not unbearable to read, at the very least. It’s not always poetry, exactly, sometimes more like journals and such, but it’s still decent. 

He’d never admit it, but it does make Jon somewhat annoyed that he is an alright poet. Here he’s spent his life hating poems, and now evidently he can eke out a few himself? Irritating. He fills one small notebook, the type he can slip in his pocket, and he does not get another. (He continues to write notes app poetry.)

He wants it to make him feel more connected to Martin. He hopes it does. He certainly learns to have a greater appreciation for all poetry, though not enough for him to seek out much more than whatever anthologies Georgie has on her shelves. He wonders what Martin writes about, and he feels a deep guilt for ever dismissing his hobby.

It helps him, truly, he thinks. In poetry, he can organize his feelings better, while still being allowed to be a bit shifting and uncertain. It lets him turn his ideas and experiences into words, and he has always been good with words. Words make things solid. Defined.

When Jon is kidnapped by Nikola, he is unable to write poetry, or journals, or anything at all. But the skills he’s developed still come in handy. He is able to sit, bound up, lotion rubbed into his skin, and think properly about how he is feeling, what he is experiencing. He is able to learn not just from what Nikola says, but from what he sees, able to turn the garbled mess of his thoughts into neat and organized piles.

Jon eventually finds his way back to the Institute. (Gets helped back to the Institute by the thing that is not, cannot be Helen). He won’t be there for too long before he’ll have to go off into danger with Tim and Bassira and Daisy (and not Martin), but it’s long enough to read a poem.

Because Jonathan Sims, even now, does not know how to actually talk about his feelings. Of course not. He can’t approach Martin and say “I don’t want you to come with us into the Unknowing because it is too dangerous and I can’t lose you, there’s no stopping Tim who thinks he needs this but I’ve already put you in danger before with Prentiss and I won’t let it happen again because it turns out I am unreasonably fond of you, Martin.” It’s simply not how he functions. 

He… He almost says it. On his tape. The one he records before walking into what may very well be his death. He actually does say something about how he feels for Martin before he rewinds the tape and starts over again. 

He can’t. He just can’t say things like that right out loud; Jon Knows, he doesn’t get to be known.

So instead, he pulls the book out of his drawer, old and gross with crescent shaped grooves from his nails all over it, and he opens it up properly to read. Not the beginning, because he can tell that the writing there is much too hasty to be a proper, planned out poem. Instead, he finds something in the middle of the book, on a page with minimal worm guts, and he reads:

“The silence of nighttime is broken  
But it was a cage  
And the sonorous sounds from your office  
Have set me free from the fear of my friendlessness.  
You should be at home  
Resting for once  
But if you left you’d be taking my home with you.  
The others leave when they should,  
The work of the day at an end  
Including the work of being my friend  
Bid goodnight with sorry voices  
Voiceless sorries in their eyes.  
I know you do not stay for me:  
You stay for the research  
And I have never been all that interesting.  
So I simply sleep  
Dreaming with your voice in my head  
And hope that the statements surrounding me  
Worm their way inside  
And make me mysterious too.”

Jon sits back for a moment after finishing. Surely, that was a poem about him. He can’t imagine anyone else who all that describes. It breaks him a little inside.

This is how Martin had thought of him: a distant workaholic that barely gave the man a second thought. Jon chuckles lightly, sadly to himself, because of course that’s how Martin thought of him. How else should he have? That’s what Jon had been.

And yet still, he’d thought of him enough, thought enough of him, even back then when Jon had just started to become a person and not a walking amalgamation of vitriol and disdain, to write a poem about him. 

“Well… Right, well, I’ll just-” Jon struggles out, and reaches out to click the recorder off. But no, he can do better than this, even just a little bit better, come on Jon, say how it’s a lovely poem say how you hope to hear Martin read some himself someday say how you’d written about him, too, how you do think he’s interesting and incredible and so many things worthy of speaking yet unwordable, please, god, Jon, just-

He turns off the recorder. Closes the book and hugs it tight to his chest, then leaves it beside the tape recorder. He can’t bring its security with him this time. It’s another message to Martin, a book with his nail marks and his blood permanently marked in it, a book whose pages have absorbed his sweat and his tears, a book that was Martin’s and then Jon’s and then was a part of Jon and then was Martin’s again. Jon wants to make Martin understand, but all he can do is walk out the door and hope.

As far as confessions go, it’s really pretty pathetic.

Shall we follow the tape, this time around? Let’s see.

Jon dies. It won’t take, but there is no way for Martin to know that as it is happening. He goes into Jon’s office and sobs behind his desk, after Tim’s funeral. He’s the only one left now, all his friends gone, everyone he’d started out here with dead.

And then the tape that Jon had left on his desk starts playing. On its own. They all seem to have such impeccable dramatic timing now, don’t they?

Under other circumstances, a tape of Jon reading his poetry might have been comforting, even thrilling. As it is, listening to Jon fulfilling his wish from so long ago as Martin hears that voice full of all the tender wistfulness of the poem, reading it as if it was just as important as a statement, is just another reminder of everything Martin has lost. 

He pops the tape out of the recorder and keeps it in his pocket. He barely even glances at the bloodied notebook. He has enough experience to know that it is probably an evil thing (his experience is wrong).

He thinks he understands the unspoken bits of the tape. What the slightly choked sounds after the poem mean, what Jon’s stuttering and the silence after it mean. What the fact that he’d even read the poem at all means. Maybe not in full, but he knows that Jon is telling him something that he won’t allow himself to grasp. Not now. Not when there’s nothing it can do anyway.

The tape stays on Martin’s person, in his desk, around him at all times as Jon continues to float in his strange living death. It is there when he yells angrily at an unhearing Archivist that he should have returned the notebook, that he should have stayed alive, that he should have talked to Martin instead of making some stupid recording. That he had not wanted it to happen this way.

It stays on his person, secretly, as Peter Lukas targets him for the Lonely. As Martin lets him, but never gives this up; even when Jon comes back and he gives up the real man for the greater good (if Lukas can be trusted), he will not give this up. 

Until the day that Jon needs it more than he does. Jon, stupid, impulsive, self sacrificial Jon goes and nearly gets himself killed again (worse, actually, than being killed) in that awful coffin, and Martin just… knows. He knows what he has to do when he leaves all the tapes and recorders and statements around the coffin. 

Maybe the Beholding really did rub off on him.

Giving away the tape feels like cutting something away, like he’d been connected by a rope that was pulled just ever so slightly taught, there for so long that he’d stopped feeling it, until the person pulling on it suddenly let go. He jolts, having gotten used to its pressure, but he’s more free now.

And the tape is back in Jon’s hands. 

Jon knows it’s there the moment he can think again after leaving the coffin. It’s still a beacon, even outside the Buried. He holds it in his hands and knows that this was a gesture on Martin’s part. It makes him feel sick with dread.

He puts the tape in the same drawer as his rib and the notebook, which he’d found still sitting, dusty and undisturbed on his desk when he’d come back from the dead, but at least Martin had the tape. (Martin no longer has the tape.) He keeps it in the drawer where he keeps the parts of himself. 

Jon finds a different tape on his desk from Martin, later (after he has made a desperate fool of himself by asking Martin to run away with him), and wonders while listening if this is what his “confession” of a tape had sounded like to him. A message with a meaning desperately trying to be understood and just barely failing. It is infuriating. Jon vows that when they get out of this (because they will, they must) he will be more explicit with these big, important things.

The old leather-bound notebook comes with Jon to his confrontation with Peter Lukas. He holds it to his chest and remembers hugging it way back when Prentiss attacked, scared out of his mind.

God, he wishes he could go back to that. 

The tapes stay in his drawer. They stay there for a while, until Bassira packs up Statements to send to Jon at Daisy’s safehouse. She figures she might as well send his personal effects as well: some pens since she’s sure the safehouse has none, some paperbacks, Jon’s rib (ew), and the two tapes in Jon’s drawer.

It all takes three days to arrive at the safehouse. Jon pulls things out of the box, nostalgia flaring at the picture of Tim and Martin and Sasha that Tim had given him, framed (“Sometimes I worry you hole yourself up in here so long you forget what we look like”) and the black cat mug that Martin had gotten just for him (“It’s simple, I didn’t want to make you feel silly or anything, but it’s still cute and I thought you might like it”) and the very well researched book on a “real haunted house” that Sasha had leant him, with annotations (“Just, okay, read this and try to keep an open mind, it’s incredibly scientific and it investigates all other possible explanations, you can’t just write this one off”). Things that managed to survive all of this, long past the people who’d given them, mostly.

Then, he pulls out the tape. And he chuckles until he breaks down and cries, like a Jenga tower whose load-bearing piece was slowly, torturously pulled out, only for the tower to collapse anyway. 

Martin comes into the room to find Jon crying on the ground, and as always, his intuition leads him straight to the problem; his eyes land on the tape in Jon’s hand.

“Oh, Jon,” Martin whispers.

The two of them cry together over it, on the floor of the still rather dusty floor of their safehouse. They laugh too, because isn’t it all so absurd? The two of them, the least qualified of them all, the only two survivors? The two of them, crying on the floor? This tape is everything they’ve done wrong, all the ways their own insecurities and shortcomings have led to so much destruction, how their inability to simply talk to each other like adults has done so much to hurt them; it’s all represented by this stupid little tape.

Martin pulls himself together first, not for real, but enough to take the tape from Jon’s hands and slot it into a recorder nearby. There is always a recorder nearby. He hits rewind on the tape. Jon looks up at him, and then confusion melts to understanding, a small smile spreading on his face.

The two of them are sitting cross legged on the ground, now. Jon is holding Martin’s (his) notebook, an honestly disgusting thing with the bodily fluids of at least two species coating it, and Martin is holding Jon’s phone with the notes app open.

“I think I’ll go first, this time. My turn to read your poetry,” Martin is saying.

“I’d like that,” Jon is saying. “I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of my reading by now, anyway.”

“Yeah, but this is different. This is your choice, really your choice.” And now, something is occurring to Martin. “When you read a statement, you have to read it in that voice, right? The really personal, expressive one?”

Jon is nodding. “I get lost in it. I don’t even know what I sound like until afterward.”

“Did it work the same way when you read my poem?”

Jon is giving this a bit of thought. Give him a moment. “No, I- I don’t think it did,” he is saying thoughtfully, at last. 

“Because you read it just right, all the feelings and all,” Martin is saying.

“I suppose I just… tried to think of how you’d written it. What you’d wanted to convey.” Jon is looking away, rather shyly. “It was strange, to see myself from your eyes. But it was beautiful, too.”

Martin is reaching out to grasp Jon’s hand, hoping it conveys everything he’s feeling. And then, because he’s learned that communicating with gestures is a terrible idea between the two of them, he is saying, “I always felt the same way about you. I wanted you to read my poems so that I could- so that I could hear how you would portray me. What I was like to you.”

Jon is brushing tears out of his eye with the heel of his hand. “If only we’d just told each other.” 

Martin is closing his eyes, taking a breath, and looking at Jon. “That’s what we’re going to do now.”

Jon is hitting record. Together, he and Martin are recording over the original tape (and then some), reading poems about ships in the night and canned peaches and soft hands and lost friends. They are documenting themselves in the other’s voice, seeing themselves through each other’s eyes. They go until the tape is filled, and then they stay reading still. They are reading still and we do not get to see it. 

Not everything in life must be recorded.

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: the statement at the start is "the bone turner's tale," the first statement that ever really freaked me out. i Do Not Like the flesh.
> 
> anyway, this feels like i expand more and make this one of those epic, beautiful, detailed and poetic fics but i'm not ready to do that just yet. i hope y'all like this anyway!


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